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85% Of Car Drivers Break 20mph Speed Limits, Reveals U.K.’s Department For Transport
(www.forbes.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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There are quite a few 20 mph roads near me where the only incentive to slow down is to avoid being caught be a speed camera.
The roads are wide and straight for long stretches, and going at the 20 mph limit just means you become an obstruction for the rest of traffic, even buses and lorries.
The design of the road and posted speed limits are sending mixed messages.
There's a concept in road design that says the engineer must first determine the design speed, which is basically how fast they want traffic to be able to flow. This part of the process is generally not part of any public hearing or put to a vote by public officials - it is just decided on and then they move on to the next step.
There's also a prevailing concept in road design that seems to indicate that high traffic speeds are a design issue, but low speeds are an enforcement issue. The road is designed to accommodate the highest amount of traffic anticipated in the future without really thinking about if that's even a good fit for the area.
Once the road has been built to exacting standards (which means it is far too wide and flat,) the city steps in and slaps a speed limit on it, often at odds with the design speed.
When residents get worried about all the speeding cars, they petition the city for a traffic study to see if anything can be done. The engineers conducting the traffic study determine that the road is capable of handling higher speeds than the current limit, and so to cut down on speeding the recommendation is to increase the posted limit.
It's amazing to me how much influence the engineering team has on the design with basically no accountability. You can try to reduce speeding by putting up speed traps and police patrols, but at the end of the day people will drive as fast as they are comfortable with and that is often a result of the design of the road they are driving on.
@apprehensively_human
"People drive the design, not the sign."
--unknown
@MDZA @fuck_cars
Yea around here we have 4 or more lane highways with 60mph speed limits. You could almost double that safely if people actually used the lanes properly when not passing. Instead we have to deal with a mix of assholes going all different speeds trying to get around the people going 60 in the left lane and god help you of there's a cop around.
Speaking as a person who does the limit (65 locally) in the right lane, sometimes the second to right lane in case there's a lot of entering/exiting traffic.... 120mph? What? The fuck?
Humans aren't designed to react to things at that speed. You need insane following distances to drive that speed safely. With all that extra following distance you don't get much more throughput (vehicles per unit time). But what you do get is a ton more fatalities, because at that speed, when you meet stationary objects, all you can do is hope you had your affairs in order. No amount of crash safety tests help there.
I gotta say, that if you're the person who's so frustrated about people driving the speed limit on a highway, you're the asshole. Like yeah, sure, they should be in the rightmost lane practicable. That's annoying, but it slows you down by a few mph for a minute or two and that's it.
If you want to move at 120+mph safely to your destination, take high speed rail. If you don't have that in your region, start complaining.
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Honestly I was thinking more like 100mph. I can pretty easily do 90+ on the roads around me when the roads clear without issue. I don't get pissed at people for doing the speed limit. I get pissed at people that don't use lanes properly and tailgaters. If you aren't passing you should be in the farthest right lane possible until you need to pass. It's my belief that the people that jump on the highway and get 3 lanes over and just squat there not passing anyone that cause most traffic issues.
I remember doing that for my first (and only) time on the empty highways outside Salt Lake City in the early morning. It was exciting to try but fully concerning. I couldn't imagine doing that around other vehicles.
I mean, I think it's clear that those are the people who cause the most issues for people who want to break the speed limit. And I fundamentally don't believe you have the right to speed on a highway, and shouldn't complain about missing out on opportunities to speed.
Like, I'm not saying left lane squatters are driving correctly, they should be over in the rightmost lane. But also all the other drivers, including you, should be going the speed limit. Why does one arbitrary rule about lane positioning matter so much to people, while the arbitrary speed limit is fine to ignore? Real talk: they're both arbitrary rules. If you're breaking the speed limit: SHUT UP about the lane squatters.
It's not equal though. Speed limits at least on the highways around here are set way lower than what is actually safe so of course people will ignore them. As long as they're being safe (not tailgating, passing on the left, using turn signals, etc) they're not affecting anyone else. If you're squatting in a passing lane then you are actually impeding other traffic. If the speed limits were actually appropriate I would agree with you
"Impeding traffic" is quite the euphemism for "forcing people to slow down and drive the speed limit." Call it what it is, a mild inconvenience that you wouldn't even experience if you were following the rules that you're upset about people breaking!
And the people who are "speeding but still being safe" do impact others too. It makes it much more dangerous for drivers doing the limit to merge into the left lanes in case of stopped vehicles, slow trucks, and merging traffic.
Again, the speed limits usually aren't appropriate for the highways they're applied to so they don't make sense unlike rules regarding lane usage. If they did I wouldn't be complaining. It's also not anyone besides law enforcement's job to enforce them. By doing so you are creating an unsafe situation by packing all the traffic together.
If you need to merge into the left lane you simply wait for the faster traffic to go by. Are you suggesting that it's dangerous to cut people off? Because yea, it should be.
I think the core issue here is that you believe that it should be common and accepted for individuals to decide whether traffic rules "make sense" and ignore them based on their own individual assessment. I think that's absurd.
It's not my individual assessment. It's a well known fact that highways are engineered for higher speeds than the speed limits are set for.
You may enjoy the YouTube channel, Road Guy Rob. He covers a lot of these issues and more. It's a niche channel for sure, but can be fascinating if you're into that kind of thing.
I can't really make sense of what you're saying. If the road is straight and wide but also has a low speed limit, that's not sending mixed signals. Rather, it's suggesting that you should drive slow even though your instinct tells you that you could drive quickly, presumably because there are either obstacles creating blind points that could lead to pedestrian or bicycle involved accidents, small children playing nearby, or cars turning onto or from side roads that you might strike if you're driving at the speed that your gut tells you is safe.
In other words, you shouldn't trust your gut when deciding how fast is safe on a road because your gut is often mistaken about the finer points of road design.
Also, you wrote that a slow driver would be an obstruction to other vehicles including trucks. I think you were wording that as a bad thing, but in reality it's a good thing. One reasonable driver can force a dozen bad drivers to slow down.